Freedom
by TheMortalMan
Summary: A runner survives daily in the City. Like everyone, they move in a seemingly rigid direction, glimpsing at escape and wondering if the cycle will ever end. But in a world ruled by order, the chaos of freedom seems like a fleeting dream.


Against the black on black of the shadows in Faith's room, beyond a door there lied hidden answers. As she saw it, there was a period during which, in the crushing hours of exhaustion, shapes in the darkness could shift and form a kind of lens or periscope. Through this, the general din of reality would depart and, for only a moment, meaning would fill her vision. Truth. It was an art she measured and practised. Depending on how much she'd run in a day, the time to do so could be minutes. She paid attention even when her tired mind began to wander. She found that bearing the weight of her reality pressured within her a desire, a nagging, eating feeling, to find answers. Somewhere, somehow, at some point before sleep, to find answers. The room would reveal infinite truths if she let it compose right. She had no fear of the dark for this reason. She was just as in shadow as everything else. Immersion was the only route to truth.

There were three short knocks at the door.

There was Icarus. He jumped and ran. He bragged about menial things she habitually cared for. He flew too close to the sun. A well-trodden, simple message from the story was instinctual for her and, therefore, meaningless. Yet it revealed some ancient truth in arrogance. A well-trodden lifestyle had made her complacent. When she had first started running, within her was a wish, a hopeless and desperate one, that somehow one day she would wake up with fear and worry surgically removed from her. Then she could take any jump. Run any line. She would never die from indecision at the edge. It seemed like a pragmatic wish. But it was pure arrogance, really. For the longest time, pure arrogance. How purer could it be? A desire to remove an element of the human soul for advancement. No, fear was to be respected. Icarus had no fear. At least, not up until the wax started melting.

Three more knocks, now louder and more pronounced. A kind of eager frustration has set into them.

She had been lying on her left hand. Blood was straining to get to the nerve endings. It felt like a hundred sparks inside the fingers, thumb and palm were dancing around, crying to be moved. She shuffled, facing the door. Now free, blood returned to it. Her legs could never be comfortable. It was not as though they could get any stronger, either. Within her was a sense that she had reached the peak of her physical capacity. The trouble was that, when dormant, a body like hers wished for nothing but movement. Her ankles twitched instinctively, constantly. The legs ached; she had to move them. When she could not, they just hurt. She stretched them out. The muscles tensed like steel cable.

Feathers cannot support a full sized person. How did the base of the wings even attach to his back? Some historian must have a thesis. A piece of writing. How could you title a book like that? How Icarus' Wings Attached To His Back and Other Such High-Caste Concerns/em. Locked away in some penthouse or some residential in The Shard. Now that is arrogance, Faith thinks. She could meet that arrogance.

No one was ever born arrogant, she thought. It takes learning. It's a skill, a trait we can gain. Just like anything else. Vanity, self-centeredness; all branches of the same tree. Easy, indulgent parts of the brain. It was learnt through of experience, Faith thought. How do you have any sort of perspective without first suffering alienation? How can you have shame without first committing a guilt-ridden act? Pain without torment? Arrogance without failure?

Her door was dark too. Beside it, at about waist height, was the blurred, near untraceable outline of her lock pad. On it was a pinprick of green light. A laser-dot in the dark; a sniper-mark in the night. She was fixated on it. Staring. Waiting for it to shift and change. Her eyes burned, and at every blink, her eyelids fell like cinderblocks. Would the light yield truth as darkness did? It seemed too artificial, too small and meaningless to bring emotion to her, let alone any truth. She stared some more. It reminded her of the riots at night. When the sun set back then so did a kind of frenzy that what had happened had actually happened, and was still happening. Fireteams had used laser-lights on weaponry to reduce the incidents of friendly fire, and it had worked flawlessly until a group of inspiringly well-organised low-caste kids from the Re-Zoning district gathered up all the green laser pointers they could find and had misdirected hundreds of K-Sec in little under three weeks. The Conductors, they called themselves. They had embodied a kind of mobile ingenuity from everyone seriously involved in the riots. K-Sec embodied arrogance. Their arrogance had led to underestimation. A lack of fear. An underestimation, or lack of fear, of ingenuity, of wax, or of a jump were equally destructive. Each could lead to ruin. It all converged meaningfully in the end. The laser-light had given her something truthful.

Behind the door, there's a group of men talking. They have body armour and guns carrying lethal ammunition. They do not want to kill anyone, they tell themselves. They do not want to, but a beating, a rough up – a real scare – that they feel they deserve. They are excited. Beyond the door, morality and ordinary human law can fade away to nothing. Beyond the door, power will become all. Beyond the door, they will possess the ultimate power: the control of human life. Maybe they do want to kill someone.

Faith twisted and grimaced, opening her eyes again. Yet more arrogance to think that she can cherry-pick her memories of the riots as if with enough care only the good ones would surface. There is no control over memory, she reminded herself. The millions of things we forget are gone; the few things we remember are a part of us. She told herself this again. But the riots were such a chaotic time, she thought. The very idea that corporate law could be challenged or even broken. The very whisper that beyond our structure lied not just other beliefs, other societies, but the tools themselves to build one entirely unique from that which had come before or existed now. A promised land, true freedom, first glimpsed at like sunlight over glass then realised like the dawn. What an idea, Faith thought. Merely imagining it visually set fire to passion within her that was as real as any pain she had ever endured.

To survive she fantasied what true freedom would look like. To her, it would look like a group of people on a green field somewhere watching the sunrise. The field was green because tall grass grew around them. Some were sitting, some were standing. To lull herself into sleep on the hardest nights sometimes she imagined what their names were, or what they talked about to each other. She didn't know what these people wanted, or where they were going. But that, intoxicatingly, was the best part. They didn't either. She grinned at the thought. No rule of law, no code of conduct. Who knew what a human being was like when they were truly free? How vast that green field was. How infinite those ideas, those people. How free.

Too free. Too much of a threat to the stability of the City. Too unrealistic, too shocking for the mid-caste to accept. Too difficult for the holders of such a belief to sustain themselves. The sunrise faded to nothing when people died. Then it just seemed too farfetched. If such an idea had embedded, then only spread, Faith thought. If only a whisper of it had carried on the lips of the low-caste to the mid-caste. No, riots were different. Groups of kids humiliating K-Sec patrols with dime store laser pointers. People burning effigies of Kruger. People blowing up things, using violence, sprinting wildly and screaming down streets like partygoers. Talking to each other and making plans as if detached from their own mortality. Parents taking their children to marches. No, riots were much different. Riots demanded annihilation. Now, all that is left are the most bitter, spiteful and hateful from those droves of hopefuls. The kind that plants bombs and makes examples in fits of pure desperation and nihilism. Who would want that, really? Who would want that as a basis for living? Among that green field watching the sunrise, would claim, would admit, to have planted bombs to get there?

The team behind the door kick it down. Inside, a man stands close by at the kitchen counter, and the breach team lead fires at him six times because he was holding a phone in his hand that looked like a firearm. They sweep in. The man is dead a few seconds after he lands on the ground. Post-mortem analysis places the cause of death at overwhelming head trauma, four rounds that passed through his chest area including the lungs and heart, one through his neck, and another through the skull and into the front cortex. A woman then moves into the same kitchen as the man and, because she screams and runs too fast, is fired upon as well. This time, the squad leader, breach team lead and flank guard all discharge at once. The woman is dead before she hits the ground. Post-mortem analysis leads prosecutors to believe the bullets impacted a collective of fifteen times in the chest area and five in the head. They briefly search the apartment and are led to believe that the two daughters are elsewhere. The squad leader concludes the report, who is a middle-aged man with no family called Haitham Barely, as such; "considering the pressure of the situation, we considered it a job well done.

Faith contorted and gasped as if in pain. Reliving all of it was unbearable, but it seemed like she had to. Once it had begun, she was inexorably glued to it, like a car crash in slow motion. Every night, in the terrifying loneliness of the dark, she relived it all. She shut her eyes and knew she would not sleep.

* * *

 **This was a short piece that, after refining, I felt was good enough for someone to maybe enjoy. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.**


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